[Dovecot] SIS and restoring from backups

[Charles Marcus]

On 2012-03-28 7:57 PM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> It's easy to restore a full backup. And it's easy to restore specific
> users if you have the full backup easily accessible (just run doveadm
> import with proper settings pointing to backup). What's difficult is
> if you just want to restore a specific user from the backup and can't
> easily do random access to all files. Then you'll first need to
> restore the user's dbox files and then somehow figure out which
> attachments to restore from the SIS directory.

Well, I think I'm not going to worry about this, since you recently said:

On 2012-03-24 9:16 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
 > On 24.3.2012, at 14.54, Charles Marcus wrote:
 >> I was also thinking of asking about how to provide read-only access
 >> to these backup snapshots to the users in some kind of special
 >> namespace, so that they could all essentially go 'back in time' to
 >> grab any emails that they may have inadvertently deleted...

 > This should be possible, just point the namespace to such snapshot.
 > You may need to point CONTROL dir to some temporary directory and
 > index dir as well to either temp or to memory.

If we really can get these snapshots to automatically show up under a 
'Backups' namespace, with each users folders under each snapshot showing 
by date, so they can easily 'go back in time' and retrieve anything they 
want from them, that totally eliminates any need for me to do individual 
restores... :)

> I'd guess that with rsnapshot + Maildir you can get duplicate Maildir
> files if the rsnapshot is accessing a large maildir at the same time
> as user is changing a message flag. Dovecot usually notices these
> duplicates and logs a warning about them.

This won't be a problem wither, because our new system will be 
performing filesystem snapshots for rsnapshot to use as a source.

Thanks again!

-- 

Best regards,

Charles